Pokemon GO Festival in Chicago was a disaster. Simple as that. Niantic had problems with their network and had massive server issues where most attendees couldn’t log into their apps to be a part of the special raid events.
In response, Niantic issued refunds on all tickets for people who attended the Chicago event and also provided those individuals with $100 in PokeCoins. On top of that, trainers were given special eggs that contained legendary Pokemon. But people still seem to be super upset to the point that they filed a lawsuit against Niantic.
According to Polygon, Chicago-based attorney Thomas Zimmerman said he was contacted by Jonathan Norton, a California local who traveled to Chicago for the event. He and “20 or 30” others found it outrageous that Niantic wouldn’t reimburse their travel expenses so they have filed a class-action lawsuit against the company.
“He paid to fly out [to Chicago] for the festival, and had to wait for several hours in line, just like most everybody else in order to get in,” Zimmerman said. Norton was quite upset that Niantic falsely advertised the event. Zimmerman stated that this went against what Niantic advertised, which was that attendees would get hard-to-find Pokémon.
“We’re not seeking any relief with respect to the failure to get legendary Pokémon, because Niantic is offering that,” Zimmerman continued. “But Niantic is not offering to refund people’s travel expenses for coming to Chicago. Most of the people came from out of state, many people from other countries — I talked to someone who flew in from Japan.”
Zimmerman stated that his clients are asking for the amount of money spent on travel be covered more than anything else. even though Niantic made “promises that were not kept.”
“The issue is, what was promised, what was the incentive that people relied on and the representations that people relied on to buy a ticket and make travel plans and fly to Chicago to participate in this festival, would they have done that had they known that that was not going to be lived up to and they weren’t going to get the experience that was represented?” Zimmerman asked.
Niantic has issued a statement in regards to the matter: “Niantic does not comment on pending legal matters.”
What are your thoughts about the lawsuit?
Wow what a bunch of whiny entitled morons….leave it to them to not think outside the box.
So what happens if they buy tickets to go to a concert in another state, pay money to travel to that state and the concert gets cancelled? The concert is only liable for the real-value cost of the tickets (not what the buyer paid if say, he bought them from a scalper).
This lawsuit has no chance.
But….let’s be honest here.
Go Fest was an experiment and a lot of lessons learned. Niantic is a company that has put on countless events for its other game, Ingress that mostly went off without a hitch. The company KNEW how popular Pokemon Go is. They KNEW, by the number of tickets sold, how many people would show up. They KNEW there was going to be a serious load on surrounding cell towers in Chicago and called all the providers to make sure they could handle the load. Only Sprint sent mobile towers to help out.
These entitled idiots should stop blaming Niantic, a company that at least made SOME effort to solve problems ahead of time and when it failed, compensated attendees with refunds, in-game currency AND a free legendary Pokemon, and instead blame the cell service providers who did not listen to Niantic and take care of their customers.
Those 30 people need to grow up and put on their big boy pants.